Building a Target Driven Sales Environment

Regardless of the industry you work in, every company ultimately has the same target and goal: to increase revenue and grow their business.

So what’s setting the top tier sales teams apart from their competitors? Surely they, too, have their sights set towards success, but how and why is Company A growing at twice the speed of Company B?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “a goal without a plan is just a wish,” and that therein lies the difference.

This is where target driven sales come in.

What Are Target Driven Sales?

Target driven sales are more or less as they sound: one or many targets or goals designed to help your sales team achieve a desired result. By setting clearly defined measurable targets, your sales team will be able to better focus and apply strategies to achieve the goal quicker and more efficiently than they would have without.

Below we’re going to outline the benefits of target driven sales and how you can turn your sales team from one with a wish to one with a plan.

The Importance of Target Driven Sales

The best way to think about target driven sales is to consider that sales targets are the end-objective, and target driven sales are the processes that outline how exactly you’re going to successfully complete that objective.

They are essential to business owners and team leaders, and the fact of the matter is that if you’re not striving to create an environment with goals at the helm, you’re setting your team and your business up for potential failure.

The reason they’re so important is that without a clear plan in place, you have no real way of quantifiably measuring if you’re progressing towards your objective as efficiently as you could be. It’s like saying you want to receive 10 client referrals by the end of the month, but you just sit on your hands and hope they come to you.

Sure you might still hit your target, but maybe you could have hit that target 10 days sooner, or better yet, you could have surpassed it, if you had outlined a process that would lead to more referrals and acted on it.

The Benefits of Target Driven Sales Environment

Increased workflow

Clear goals in attainable timelines

Measurable progress

Better understanding of what’s working and what’s not

Boosts employee morale

Sets everyone up for success

How To Build A Target Driven Sales Environment

Now that you understand just how beneficial a target-based sales environment could be to your business, the next step is to actually implement a plan that’ll work towards building your team towards your key objectives.

Step 1: What’s The Big Picture?

For target driven sales to work well, they need to align with the company’s goals; the big picture, if you will. So how do we do that?

Well, first we ask ourselves, “what is the big picture?” Usually, this is defined with your target revenue. Until you know that figure, it’s difficult to set targets to match.

Once you’ve calculated your target revenue, it’s time to peel it back into smaller goals; quarterly, monthly, and weekly targets. From there, you can determine what changes to individual employees targets you’re going to have to make in order to achieve those goals.

Step 2: Prioritize Targets Within Your Team

It’s important that when you’re setting sales targets that you’re focusing on key metrics that will help you achieve your goals more efficiently. This means tailoring goals to specific team members and their workflow.

If Billy is a wizard at closing sales over email, set him up for success by encouraging him to turn his usual 20 closes a day into 30, and let him do it the way he’s shown you he knows how. For Billy, setting targets to improve his cold calling may not be the most benefit to the business as a whole.

Comparatively, if Sharon is brand new to selling, she’s going to need to focus more on improving her personal skills and could benefit from a mentor to help her learn the ropes. When you understand your team, you’ll better understand how to strategically prioritize their individual goals for the benefit of everyone.

If you’re not sure what your teams’ individual goals are, now is a great time to sit down with them and talk about how you can help them improve their skill sets.

Step 3: Gradually Increase Workload

Don’t rush the process. If your strategic plan consists of getting your sales team to up their cold calls from 50 a day to 100 a day, you run the risk of overwhelming them, lowering morale, and ultimately failing at the objective.

Set realistic, attainable goals, and do so gradually. Trying to do too much too quickly will lead to burnout; steady, consistent progress is the goal here. As the team gets comfortable with an additional 10 calls a day, up it to 15, then 20, and so on and so forth until they reach the long-term goal.

Step 4: Motivate With Incentives

Once you’ve set your targets and everyone is on the same page as far as their key objectives are concerned, it’s time to really ramp up the team with incentives designed to motivate and inspire.

Now, this doesn’t have to be a monetary incentive, in fact, research suggests that the most common motivator for people in sales is a more balanced work and home life, not the number on their paycheck. Remember, your sales team is made up of diverse individuals with their own specific thoughts, goals, and dreams, and to effectively motivate them it’s going to come down to what we mentioned above – knowing them.

Maybe Paula can take off early on Friday’s so that she can regularly attend her daughter’s ballet class, but only if she improves her sales between Monday and Thursday.

Or perhaps ultra-competitive Reggie wants to be on the top of the leaderboard, so how about encouraging the entire team with a fun challenge to see who makes the most sales over the course of the next month? You could even sweeten the deal with a vacation day.

The incentives can be tiered towards personal growth, as well, like Thomas who is feeling a little unsure of his computer skills and could benefit from a week off to attend a training course.

When your team feels like their needs are being heard and they’re given the opportunity to work towards their personal goals, not just their bosses goals, they’re encouraged to work harder because quite simply, they’re happier.

A happy salesforce is a strong salesforce.

Step 5: Check-In and Reflect On Progress, Regularly

While it’s great to have a plan, if you’re not keeping yourself and your team accountable with regular check-ins, you’re unlikely to see the kind of positive growth you’re looking for. By putting structures in place to regularly assess how well your plan is progressing towards your key objectives you’ll catch errors and inconsistencies that might require further attention, and you might even find that the idea you had initially simply isn’t executing the way you thought it would.

This includes checking in on your team members. Ask them what’s working for them and how they’re feeling about the new processes you’ve implemented; at the very least, they’ll feel involved in the process which shows them you see true value in having them on your team.

If your team is finding that they’re not able to meet their goals in the timeline you’ve set, they’re going to get discouraged with the process and they could even lose a little faith in your decision-making. Just as you wouldn’t want to be caught off guard by a huge drop in revenue, you don’t want to come back to your strategic plan a year after implementing it only to find it didn’t encourage any growth at all. On the other end of the spectrum, you could find that the new processes are working really well, which leads to the question, how can we scale this even further?

Conclusion

Building a target driven sales environment doesn’t happen overnight, and nobody disagrees that keeping your team on track can certainly be tricky at times, but when you take the time to consider your goals and set a target-driven plan in place to achieve them, everybody wins.

By ensuring the targets you’re setting are realistic and attainable and learning the best ways to motivate your team, your team will be dominating the sales field in no time and it’ll be reflected by the success of your business.

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Serial entrepreneur who loves a deep dive into technology and applying it to solve business problems. Matt recognized that gamification of business activity processes would lead to greater staff engagement, increase productivity and motivate the team to do more, so that businesses sell more and grow more.